LATEST COVERAGE
Diversity Comes to Prime-Time TV
Nighttime television usually belongs to journalists and white comics. Now Aspire wants an alternative, and is bringing five black women together for a good gab.
Prime time and late night are usually filled with journalists like Barbara Walters and white comics. But come June, the fledging African-American cable network Aspire wants you to have choices.
From left to right: Angela Burt-Murray, Erin Jackson, Malinda Williams, Issa Raye and Rene Syler. (Aspire)
Which is why the network, owned by NBA legend Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson, announced last week that it would premiere Exhale, a new nighttime gab fest featuring five women of color. Journalist Angela Burt Murray, comic Erin Jackson, web sensation Issa Raye, Rene Styler, and actress Malinda Williams were tapped to host the hour-long talk show, on which they will chat about everything from relationships and child-rearing to natural hair care. This fall will also see the return of late-night favorite and Johnson’s good friend Arsenio Hall. Queen Latifah will have a daytime show.
The Greatest ‘Gatsby’ Debate
Baz Luhrmann’s glitzy take on Fitgerald’s classic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has critics sharply divided. Daily Beast fashion editor Isabel Wilkinson and culture writer/editor Marlow Stern take sides.
The Great Gatsby, director Baz Luhrmann’s $127 million 3-D film adaptation of the celebrated 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is earning cheers and jeers from critics—in nearly equal measure.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
For the uninitiated, the film is set at the height of the Roaring ‘20s—a time of glitz, glamour, and illegal booze. Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a struggling bond trader who rents a summer cottage next to the mysterious mega-rich Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio) on the Long Island coast. The enigmatic Gatsby throws over-the-top weekly parties, which we later learn are to attract the attention of Carraway’s cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan)—a socialite Gatsby is hopelessly in love with. Unfortunately for him, Daisy is married to the brutish Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), a classist, racist old-money scoundrel who cheats on her with the working class Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher). Gatsby, with the help of Carraway, attempts to rekindle his romance with Daisy.
The Week in Viral Videos
Jodi Arias is convicted of murder, a survivor is pulled from the collapsed Bangladesh factory 17 days later, and the ‘Ender’s Game’ trailer drops. WATCH our countdown of the best and buzziest.
10. Police Helicopter Shootout Looks Like Video Game
This shocking video is real, not just a screengrab from Call of Duty. The footage, taken in May 2012 but only recently made public, shows a Brazilian police chopper chasing after—and shooting wildly at—the fleeing car of drug lord Marcio “Mathematician” Pereira.
Demi’s New Boyfriend Is Amazing
He’s 20 years younger and a professional pearl diver. His name is Will Hanigan or Simranjeet Singh, depending on who you ask. Meet Demi Moore’s awesome new love interest.
“The rainforest will heal you on so many different levels. The ayahuasca gives you the visual journey of what you’re going through on a physical and meta-physical level. It’s good.”
Demi Moore arrives at the Target presents AFI Night at the movies held at ArcLight Hollywood on April 24, 2013 in Hollywood, California. (Michael Tran/FilmMagic/Getty)
Ladies and gentleman, meet Demi Moore’s alleged new boyfriend.
There are some pretty wild parties in Baz Luhrmann’s ‘The Great Gatsby,’ in theater Fri. From the Roaring Twenties free-for-alls in ‘Gatsby’ to the orgies in ‘Caligula,’ check out the wildest movie parties.
Baz Luhrmann’s over-the-top $127 million 3-D film adaptation of The Great Gatsby, the celebrated 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, has earned mixed reviews. But one thing most people can agree on is the parties that Gatsby, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, throws are pretty out-of-control—thanks to the design and costume work by Luhrmann’s Oscar-winning wife and producing partner, Catherine Martin (with a tip of the hat to Miuccia Prada and Brooks Brothers).
A party scene from The Great Gatsby. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
But where do Gatsby’s jazzy, champagne-poppin’ parties stand among the wildest movie parties ever?
8 Best Music Videos of the Week
David Bowie gets religious. Iggy Azalea goes Bollywood. WATCH VIDEO of the most entertaining, breathtaking, and bizarre music videos released this week.
In this week’s top music-video picks, we take a journey through a postapocalyptic world, a jewelry heist, and vibrant stop-motion animation. From hip-hop to electronic and indie rock, and featuring artists like Fun. and Queens of the Stone Age, see which music videos are becoming viral.
David Bowie: “The Next Day”
The Problem With Daisy
Why have critics and readers throughout the ages hated Gatsby’s girl so much? By Katie Baker.
Is there any female character in American literature more coquettish and coveted than Daisy Fay Buchanan? She’s the most desirable debutante, the ever-evading maid. She’s warm, feverish, thrilling, intoxicating—a siren, an enchantress, a blossoming flower. She’s Galahad’s chalice; she’s Guinevere and the Grail. She’s the quintessential Southern belle, cool in her white dress with her white mansion and her little white mobile. She’s the enchanted object, the great American dream, all bright eyes and a voice full of money—and of course she’s the light, that green light, drawing men, mothlike, to her flame. She’s the golden girl and the incorruptible angel and all the Platonic ideals that artists and poets throughout the great ages have required their muses to be.
She’s also—at least for many of The Great Gatsby’s readers—a rather unpleasant inamorata, at best infantile and impressionable, and at worst, possibly selfish to the point of pathology. In his afterward to the 1992 edition, publisher Charles Scribner III writes that Fitzgerald blamed Gatsby’s initial commercial failure on the fact that “the book contains no important woman character and women control the fiction market at present.” Seeing as how Daisy is at the heart of the novel and of Jay Gatsby’s very existence, we can only infer that F. Scott meant his book contained no sympathetic woman character. Edwin Clark, writing the first New York Times review of Gatsby in April 1925, seemed to agree: the East Eggers, he said, had a “meanness of spirit, a carelessness and absence of loyalties…dumb in their insensate selfishness, and only to be pitied.”
Carelessness—which is also Nick Carraway’s final assessment of the Buchanans—happens to be among the nicer things that critics have said about Miss Daisy née Fay. Academics have compiled lists of the brackish opprobrium slung at Gatsby’s girl: she’s a woman of “vicious emptiness,” of “criminal amorality,” a “destroyer” and “femme fatale,” the “villain-heroine” who stands as both “Dark Lady and Fair, witch and redeemer.” Alfred Kazin found her “vulgar and inhuman.” A literary friend judged her “vapid, naïve,” a superficial “Lotus Eater” narcoticized on privilege and blind admiration.
Television’s Meanest Mothers
Forget June Cleaver, some of TV’s greatest moms are downright mean. From Mad Men’s Betty Draper to Game of Thrones’s Cersei, see which mothers did bitchy best this season.
Carrie’s Margaret White. Olivia Foxworthy of Flowers in the Attic. The Goonies’ Mama Fratelli—there are plenty of terrifying movie mothers, but the bad moms of cinema aren’t the only ones who have us praying for the well-being of their spawn. The evil mothers of television have also carved out a niche in our hearts—and nightmares.
January Jones, Lena Headey, Vera Farmiga, Madeleine Stowe (AMC, HBO, A&E, and ABC)
And just in time for Mother’s Day, The Daily Beast lists this season’s most memorable meanie moms on TV—from Mad Men’s Betty Draper (January Jones) and Game of Thrones’ Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) to Bates Motel’s Norma Bates (Vera Farmiga)—using a Joan Crawford meter-of-meanness we last used here.
Catholics vs. David Bowie
The Catholic League labeled the great David Bowie a “switch-hitting bisexual senior citizen from London” over Bowie’s new music video for “The Next Day,” depicting him as Jesus. It’s ridiculous, writes Marlow Stern.
David Bowie’s latest—and brilliant—music video for “The Next Day,” the title track off his critically acclaimed album released in early March, depicts a caliginous brothel of sorts run by members of the clergy, with scantily-clad women kissing their hands for cash. Various pale-faced men deliver lashes to their own backs. Gary Oldman plays a priest who revels in the proceedings, dancing provocatively with one of the supposed women of the night, played by a glammed-up Marion Cotillard. The Thin White Duke, dressed like Jesus, performs the song for the crowd and when he points at Cotillard, she experiences stigmata.
The Catholic League, as is their wont, is in a tizzy over the Floria Sigismondi-directed video. League President Bill Donahue went all fire and brimstone on Ziggy Stardust in a message posted on the organization’s site titled “Bowie’s ‘Jesus ‘ Video is a Mess.”
The 'Idol' Judges Curse
The four ‘Idol’ judges are reportedly getting the pink slip. With speculation starting over who should replace them, the better question is why would anyone want to?
It’s become Hollywood and the music industry’s favorite new parlor game: star casting reality TV talent competition judges. But with an increasing number of beaten-down A-listers limping away from these judges tables with bruised reputations and dim career prospects—albeit a fair amount richer—and the shows themselves barely seeing a benefit, it may be time to call game over.
From left: Keith Urban, Nicki Minaj, Randy Jackson and Mariah Carey. (Michael Becker/FOX)
News leaked from an “insider” Thursday that Fox is planning to fire all four of American Idol’s judges at the end of this season, the lowest rated of the reality TV elder’s 12 seasons thus far. That means that Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj, Keith Urban, and Randy Jackson, who has thus far survived every dizzying round of musical chairs at the Idol judges table, are all getting pink slipped. Or, at least, that will now be the narrative when the quartet does not return next year—they were fired—even if they had planned on quitting on their terms.
Cheat Sheet
Entertainment
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COLD TURKEY
A&E’s ‘Intervention’ Canceled
After 8 years and 243 interventions. More
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OH GOD
Amanda Bynes Arrested in NYC
Allegedly threw a bong out a 36th-story window.More
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BOX OFFICE
‘Fast & Furious’ and ‘Hangover’ Face Off
‘Hangover’ kicks off to disappointing start.More
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Hey Girl
Ryan Gosling’s Film Booed at Cannes
“Only God Forgives” panned.More
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GRAMMAR CLASS
Lonely Island Sings of Semicolons
In new track released Wednesday.More
Lately
TODAY'S STORIES
Amanda Bynes Wigs Out
The troubled child star donned a platinum blonde wig while facing drug charges in court Friday. The meltdown was inevitable, so why are we still surprised?
Exit Stage Left
Goodbye, ‘Smash’!
Foolish Games
Whatever Happened to Jewel?
Top Chef
America’s Next Great Chef Is 14
Review
The Many Shades of Liberace
'Arrested Development:' F*** Yea!
Although the cult-popular sitcom was celebrated for its witty repartee and cartoonish characters, 'Arrested Development' also had its fair share of crass f&%^*** humor. As the world gets ready for the show's return, here are the best of the bleeps.
Elsewhere
Fashion Beast
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Amanda Bynes Wigs Out
The troubled child star donned a platinum blonde wig while facing drug charges in court... More
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Jenna Lyons Will Not Wear Google Glass; UN Backs Woman Who Sued Prada Japan for Sexual Discrimination
and there's been another Cannes jewelry heist. More
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The Week’s Best & Worst Dressed
Cannes brought out some wild ensembles.... More
Elsewhere
The Royalist
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William: Bayern Munich Will Win Euro Soccer League
Willima is president of the British FA and was speaking at a soccer event in London today More
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King Edward VIII's Phone Was Bugged By His Own Government
Post Office ordered to monitor King's calls More
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Queen to Visit London Terror Site
The Queen is to go ahead with a long-planned visit to Woolwich Barracks next week More












